Original author:Joyce，BlockBeats
Original editor: Jack, BlockBeats
The bull return signal that the crypto community has been waiting for has lasted for more than two months, and the narrative of the blockchain game track has once again attracted the attention of investors. The Immutable There was a nearly 300% increase in two months. At the same time, Ronin, whose market value is less than 1/5 of Immutable, also achieved a 340% increase in two months.
When it comes to Ronin, most people’s memories still focus on Axie Infinity, the leading chain game that created GameFi fever during the last bull market. Two years have passed and Axie Infinity is still alive, as is Ronin.
Ronin recovery
You can’t overestimate the Axie Infinity from 2020 to 2021. With a monthly revenue of US$300 million, daily revenue once surpassed Honor of Kings, and the birth of large game unions such as YGG, Axie Infinitys success attracted a large number of game enthusiasts and developers to join the Web3 game field, shaping todays GameFi track.
But like most popular projects in the crypto industry, Axie Infinity has not escaped the curse of ups and downs in the currency circle. After hitting 2.8 billion daily active users in November 2021, the massive expansion of game assets has raised Axie Infinitys new user threshold to an unsustainable level. Without new players entering the game, the internal economy of the game is also unsustainable due to the demand mechanism and inflation model. At the end of the year, as the crypto market gradually turned bearish, Axie Infinity fell into a death spiral, with its market value falling from US$10 billion to US$3 billion, evaporating nearly 70% in two months.
According to data released by Nansen, in November, the number of active addresses of Ronin exceeded 460,000, a month-on-month increase of 368%, which was the largest increase among all Ethereum side chains. After a round of bulls and bears, Ronin is still here.
600 million stolen
For Sky Mavis, the development team behind Axie Infinity, the blow of the big crash was particularly painful, because just a few months ago, they had just launched their next ambitious big voyage plan-the Ronin Network.
Ronin is an Ethereum sidechain originally created specifically for the Axie Infinity community. During 2020 to 2021, due to the influx of players into Axie Infinity, Ethereums slow settlement and excessive gas costs became the teams biggest headaches. Sky Mavis urgently needs a reliable, fast and cheap network to ensure the continued development of Axie. After partner Loom decided not to customize the L2 network for To C applications, the Ronin network independently developed by Sky Mavis came into being.
After having its own application chain, Sky Mavis can design the functions and features of this chain according to its own ideas and the needs of the game and its community. Axie no longer needs to compete with other DeFi projects for on-chain space and Gas. In addition to faster and lower speeds and costs, Axie players on the Ronin network also have their own game DEX and wallet, and players no longer need to leave the ecosystem to complete transaction activities. In February 2021, the Ronin network was officially launched, and by November, the daily active addresses on the chain exceeded 1 million.
The most attractive new feature for players is the staking economy that comes with the Ronin network. Ronin has a separate AXS staking pool for users to stake AXS to obtain income. Half a year after the launch of the network, the total amount of AXS pledged exceeded 20 million, accounting for nearly 30% of the circulating supply.
However, even if Ronins achievements prove Sky Maviss vision of games need independent networks, at the end of 2021, this ambitious Ronin Network still cannot reverse the decline of Axie Infinity from the general trend of the crypto market turning bearish. To make matters worse, the theft occurred early the next year.
In March 2022, a hacker attack occurred on the Ronin network cross-chain bridge, and 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC were stolen. In the days following the incident, the entire community could only watch as hackers transferred and liquidated approximately $600 million worth of assets, leaving the team with little to do.
Related Reading:Official summary of Ronin being stolen: The vulnerability was discovered 6 days ago and 5 private keys were stolen》
Two weeks after the incident, Sky Mavis announced that it would accept US$150 million in financing led by Binance, with participation from Animoca Brands and a16z. According to the plan, this round of financing will be used together with Sky Mavis’s on-book funds to compensate for all attacks. affected users. But in fact, Sky Mavis only raised $11 million in this round of financing. Binance withdrew the financing shortly after leading the investment, and a spokesperson said Sky Mavis has been able to steadily recover funds since April and is able to cover stolen user funds without investment from Binance.
$600 million stolen seems to be the last memory left by Sky Mavis and Ronin Network before fading out of peoples sight.
mending the situation before it is too late
Binance’s divestment was seen as a sign that Sky Mavis was no longer optimistic, with Sky Mavis’ valuation falling from $3 billion to $1.9 billion. Under the shadow of serious hidden dangers in network security, the price of RON tokens fell further, and the network TVL shrank by half within a month. In pursuit of speed and cost, Sky Mavis was ultimately sanctioned by the Impossible Triangle in the encryption field.
But Ronin didnt die. In order to regain the trust of the community, Sky Mavis has been strengthening Ronins network security after the theft.
In April 2022, Ronin announced the addition of five new verification nodes, namely Nansen, Delphi Digital, Stable Node, Animoca Brands and Dialectic. Animoca Brands was optimistic about and invested in Axie Infinity in its early stages, and has been a staunch supporter of Ronin ever since.
Two days after Ronin announced that it had been stolen, news broke that Animoca and the Sky Mavis team were discussing a compensation plan. Animoca later participated in a $150 million financing led by Binance, and issued a special announcement in support of Sky Mavis, We firmly believe that the kingdom of Axie Infinity will not only continue to exist, but will also flourish.
Related Reading:Animoca: Why did we renew our investment in Axie Infinity?》
In July 2022, Ronin added 4 more verification nodes. These nodes are all early supporters of Axie Infinity. These include the Web3 gaming guild YGG, whose DAO has more than 26,000 Axie and 235 Axie Land. YGG founder Gabby is an early player of Axie Infinity and met Sky Marvis founder Jihoz in 2018. Gabby founded YGG in 2020, and as of March 2022, of the 27,000 scholars in Southeast Asia, India and Latin America, 20,000 were Axie Infinity players.
Second from left, Sky Mavis co-creates Jihoz, third from left, YGG co-creates Gabby Dizon;
Half a year after the theft, at the end of September 2022, Ronin announced that Google Cloud would become its 18th verification node. Google Cloud has deep technical expertise in blockchain infrastructure and running validators, and has been Sky Maviss strategic cloud provider since 2020. Its executive Ruma Balasubramanian sees Sky Mavis as a powerful example of how cloud technology enables blockchain to bring innovation and value creation to individuals.
The DPos mechanism upgraded in March 2023 has drawn a small knot in Ronins security plan. After switching from a PoA mechanism to a DPoS mechanism, RON holders can entrust their shares to selected validators, who will verify transactions, generate blocks, and earn rewards. And representatives who vote for them will also share in the rewards. According to Ronin’s explanation, people with 250,000 RON can become validators and produce blocks. Currently, Ronin has 22 verification nodes.
Most people have noticed Ronin again, perhaps because its founder Jihoz announced in November this year that the daily active addresses of blockchain game Pixels on Ronin exceeded 100,000. At the same time, Ronins transaction volume has increased fourfold in the past three months, and the daily active addresses on the Ronin chain have grown from less than 20,000 in early October to nearly 150,000 today.
More than just enthusiasts
In March this year, Ronin worked in a number of game studios such as Directive Games and Tribes Studio. Why choose to join the Ronin ecosystem? For Web3 game developers, the answer is actually simple. Developing games is not an easy task. You need to invest a lot of time and money, continue trial and error, and grow. In the field of Web3 games, Sky Mavis has become a role model and spiritual leader for many game development teams. Their love, persistence, professionalism and deep understanding of Web3 games have become the key factors for Ronin to attract high-quality Web3 game development teams.
From Axie to Ronin
The founders of Sky Mavis, Aleksander Larsen and Nguyễn Thành Trung, met in the community of the OG chain game CryptoKitties. Larsen was the community moderator at that time. Trung appreciated Larsens contribution to the CryptoKitties community and invited him to work together to make Axies. At that time, it was just An NFT series.
Axies NFT was pre-sold in 2018 and attracted a number of fans, one of whom was Jihoz Zirlin. Jihoz Zirlin and Larsen have known each other since early in the CryptoKitties community. So Larsen suggested that Trung hire Jihoz, This guy is really excited, he will chat with everyone, and he is very suitable for running a community. Two months later, Jihoz joined the Sky Mavis team.
In October 2018, Sky Mavis released the first version of Axie Infinity. The rapidly growing number of users and wealth effects already contained huge hidden dangers. Larsen recalled in an interview, “We did not expect that it would become Being so big and growing so fast, we realized we could lose control of the games narrative if we werent careful.
After the glory faded, Sky Marvis was left with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and an unfinished story. Ronin’s future was put in front of him. The initial attempt for Axie Infinity turned into “Since we want to make a chain for ourselves.” , then you can also consider using it to serve the entire Web3 game ecosystem.
In the second half of 2021, Sky Mavis began to brew a new version of Axie Infinity, Origins. In the new version, players will receive a starter pack containing three free non-NFT Axies, and the games bias has shifted from Play to Earn to Play and Own. ”. Relying on the community support accumulated during the Classic period, Origins has continued to maintain Axies popularity in the past year instead of Classic.
On September 6, 2023, Yield Guild Games concluded its first Axie Infinity Superquests event on the Ronin Network. The project’s initial goal was 2,000 sign-ups, but it ended up attracting 4,322 participants, in addition to 1, 023 participants received in-game rewards and soul-bound achievements on the Ronin network. All data shows that Axie Infinitys player community is still active. Axie Infinity’s trading volume increased by 144% in the past month to nearly $90 million, and UAW also increased by 92.3%.
In September 2022, when both TVL and currency prices showed no improvement, Ronin carefully planned a three-day AxieCon in Barcelona with over 2,000 people in attendance, trying to send a positive signal to the outside world. During this time, the community heard a variety of presentations covering a variety of topics, from speakers from the Sky Mavis team as well as a number of community members.
From Ronins founders to the Axie Infinity development team, to game guilds such as YGG and Sura Gaming, and investors such as a16z, Sky Marviss stakeholders gathered to discuss Sky Marviss mission, vision, and Ronins product roadmap. AxieCon is viewed by Sky Marvis as “an opportunity to meet past, present and future allies in the community.”
In Jihozs introduction, Ronin is actively building scalable solutions that can be tested in actual combat, and is exploring different zero-knowledge solutions to increase transaction bandwidth so that the interaction cost for developers and gamers can be minimized. In addition to technical efforts, Aleksander, co-founder of Sky Mavis, shared the criteria for an ideal game studio, including that the founding team needs to be experienced, the product needs to cover mobile games, and the game has unissued tokens, and emphasized the studio’s Growth mindset.
A two-way ecology
In March of this year, Sky Mavis promoted Ronin to the outside world at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) in Los Angeles and launched Axie Infinitys Ronin signature. We hope that our game studio can take advantage of what we have created for Axie Infinity. everything of. Ronin believes that his understanding of games and in-depth operations are his advantages over other Web3 games.
2023 Los Angeles GDC Venue
Game studios are also willing to foot the bill. During 2022, Ronin talked to more than 200 game studios. Kathleen Osgood once said in an interview, Our strategy is not to get more people to join Ronin, but to find the right people to build a new paradigm for Web3 games. . In the end, Ronin selected 6.
The connection between Tribes Studio, which is positioned to create immersive social MMO products, and Ronin can be traced back to July 2022, when its CEO Glenn Mcguire had the first contact with Kathleen Osgood, the business director of Sky Mavis.
Tribes Studio was founded by a former King and Scopely executive. Before launching the MMO, Tribes planned to launch a community engagement platform to leverage the power of the community to promote the construction of the game. This coincides with Ronins preference for community operations. In the following months, Tribes Studio successively contacted other partners. After considering the technology stack, community culture and cooperation model, Tribes Studio chose Ronin at the GDC venue. After reaching the cooperation, Tribes Studio immediately received Ronins comprehensive help from technical guidance to marketing plans.
Bali Games, launched by South Korean game studio Anipang, has developed and operated well-known IPs such as Disney Pop and Snoopy Puzzle, with revenue exceeding US$1.8 billion and downloads exceeding 130 million times. In its cooperation with Ronin, Bali Games values the IP value of Axie Infinity and hopes to bring the Axie series to the Korean market. This is perfect for Ronin, which has already established a foothold in Southeast Asia and needs to expand its territory. Ronin also customized a marketing strategy for Bali Games, so they dont encounter the mistakes we made.
Directive Games is also one of the first five game studios to join Ronin. Directive Games is launching a shooting game called The Machines Arena. Kent Byers, the game’s chief product officer, mentioned in an interview that he is very Respect the Sky Mavis team.
In the eyes of other game development teams, the rapid development of Axie Infinity was beyond everyones expectations. It brought many new users to Web3 and pushed Sky Mavis into the spotlight. Setbacks suddenly occurred and doubts arose. Sky Mavis did not give up its efforts under pressure, but insisted on continuing to build the ecosystem. This enthusiasm and persistence for Web3 games also affects other game development teams.
In addition, Ronin can continue to maintain updates, which is inseparable from the support of its community. Although the collapse of Axie Infinity is an undeniable fact, it has precipitated a loyal community, and there are enough tolerant gamers to believe in and support this team. This tenacious and solid relationship also attracts developers. Continuously being liked by players is the goal that every game strives for.
In addition to his sincere attitude, Ronin is also very professional. The entire process from concept to release of a game is often measured in years. For Web3 game developers, compared to traditional public chains with a wide range of use cases, it will be more frank and direct to cooperate with Ronin, who focuses on games. . Kent Byers said that Directive Games and Ronin had communicated very early before establishing a cooperative relationship. Initially, Ronin raised a lot of questions about the game team. After more communication, we found that there was a lot of consensus between each other, and we began to gain their approval.
Ronin is a good home for us and we want to be a part of it. In March 2023, at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) in Los Angeles, Directive Games and Ronin completed their cooperation.
Ronin Effect
With the arrival of the first batch of game studios, Ronin has entered a new, more mature stage from the original Axie Infinity chain: an infrastructure for a wider range of chain games. In this role, Ronin began to reap the fruits of its triumphs. Footprint data shows that Ronins daily active addresses are close to 150,000, a 10-fold increase in the past two months; the number of transactions on the chain has exceeded 300,000, a new high this year.
pixel fruit
At the end of October, the metaverse chain game Pixels, which was once on Polygon, was officially launched on Ronin. Prior to this, Pixels had over 1.5 million monthly transactions and over 5,000 daily active players, making it the most popular Web3 game on Polygon.
Pixels founder Luke Barwikowski said on Twitter, Moving to the Ronin Network is about more than just user acquisition. Sky Mavis is the only team in Web3 that has truly dealt with and solved the many pitfalls that all Web3 games encounter, both economically and scalably. This guidance is priceless.
The most direct data comparison is that one month after migrating to Ronin, the number of daily active players of Pixels fluctuated around 100,000. This number was 20 times that of the Polygon period. According to OpenSea data, the floor price of Pixels Farm Land NFT A 600% increase in two months.
Left: the number of new players in Pixels; right: the number of daily active players in Pixels. Polygon is in purple and Ronin is in green.
Related Reading:Pixels 2nd Anniversary: The metaverse pixel style farm chain game that carries the Ronin ecosystem》
From wallet payments to token transactions, the effects of Ronins infrastructure updates can be felt in the Pixels player experience.
The first is the wallet. Players can use the Ronin wallet as a plug-in in the Chrome browser to directly purchase in-game tokens using legal currency. The mobile version of the Ronin wallet will also be launched as early as 2021. After integrating Binance pay on December 2 this year, users can make direct deposits through Binance on the Ronin wallet mobile terminal without scanning or copying the wallet address.
Ronin also took into account the liquidity needs of gamers for assets and launched Ronins DEX platform Katana in 2021. Its locked position exceeded US$1 billion at the peak of Axie Infinity. Since the beginning of this year, Katana’s new staking incentive program launched in January has caused RON to increase by more than 300% within a month. Ronin’s TVL has increased from US$40 million to US$77 million, and Axie Infinity’s game tokens SLP and AXS They are also nearly doubled.
In addition, in May this year, Ronin launched Mavis Market, the first NFT market. The Genkai series of NFT products cyberkongz developed by YGG founder OWL became the first mint on Mavis Market, with 3,000 pieces priced at 0.25. ETH’s Cyber Kongz Genkai NFT sold out in less than an hour, Ronin processed 1,500 successful transactions in three minutes during the minting period, and daily active addresses nearly doubled in three days.
Ronin shared the results in a newsletter, writing that Ronin is the perfect place to launch a variety of gaming-focused NFT collectibles. Genkais successful mint means Ronin is opening up to the Web3 native community outside of Axie Infinity its borders.
After Ronin was officially launched, Pixels opened the casting of Pixels Pets NFT, and Mavis Market simultaneously launched these NFTs. Currently, the RON/BERRY trading pair has also appeared on Katana. As of December 12, the number of BERRY holders has exceeded 100,000.
According to data, in November, Pixels was the best-performing chain game in terms of traffic growth, with more than 3 million visits that month, while popular chain games such as Big Time and Shrapnel had less than 500,000 visits during the same period. Among Pixels players, 51% are from Indonesia and the Philippines. Southeast Asia is the home base of Ronin and Axie Infinity.
propagation matrix
Sky Mavis Business Development Director Kathleen Osgood once mentioned in an interview that the Ronin ecosystem has a lot of community capital, so the team has been taking a more strategic approach when promoting ecological games to the broad audience of Web3 by leveraging these communities. capital to bring Web3 users to the game, Sky Mavis has more than 2,500 creators, and they are all keen to convey the community culture and atmosphere of the Ronin ecosystem to the outside world. Now, Ronin has a community, a growth stack and all the tools and platform.
In Axie Infinitys more than three years of community operation experience, the Ronin community has developed a systematic game promotion path. Axie Infinity has set up a column for game updates, and published a total of 6 articles in November. Whenever new features or seasonal activities are launched, the creators of the Axie Infinity vertical community on Youtube will update relevant interpretations and strategies. Players who want to know about new trends can obtain information directly from the community. Smooth communication channels can be used in large areas. To a certain extent, it can stabilize old players and reduce the loss of players.
The atmosphere on Twitter is even more lively, with independent players posting personalized content such as game sharing and secondary art creations. For example, many players in the community recently checked in on an Axie model launched by Axie Infinity. In addition to independent players, guilds and KOLs that frequently hold season events and live broadcast sharing on Twitter also provide impetus for maintaining community popularity. Axie Infinity officials are also very active in community interaction. One detail is that founder Jihoz pays attention to many active gamers with no more than 1,000 fans.
After Pixels DAU exceeded 100,000, founder Luke said in an interview that Pixels did not make major changes after migrating to Ronin, so the initial surge of new users was almost entirely attributed to Ronin.
The community power accumulated from the Axie Infinity period has allowed Ronin to have a huge player community. As of the time of writing, Axie Infinitys Discord community has 610,000 members and nearly 40,000 online members. This year, the AAA level has attracted the attention of the community due to its huge growth. Chain game Big Time’s Discord has 30,000 online members. Considering the vastly different attention the two have received in the community this year, it can be seen that Axie Infinity has already cultivated a loyal community.
With Ronins continued careful operation, these players often participate in Ronins ecology as creators. On social media, many players from the Axie Infinity community have formed a promotion matrix about Pixels.
Elijah MT 8, a blogger on Youtube, has been publishing videos about Axie Infinity since January 2021. Over the past two years, Elijah MT 8 has published more than 200 videos, all focusing on Axie Infinity. These videos have provided him with Having accumulated over 130,000 subscribers, Elijah MT 8 introduces himself as Axie Infinity Top 10 player on the homepage. Since November, content about Pixels has begun to appear in Elijah MT 8 videos, covering everything from beginner guides and advanced strategies to the guild section of the Pixels update two weeks ago. There are many Axie Infinity creators like Elijah MT 8 on Youtube and Twitter, and many of them have been promoting Pixels recently.
Axie.tech, a community tool website owned by Tribally, a Web3 game social platform founded in 2021, is the official community partner of Axie Infinity. Tribally announced its partnership with Pixels on October 23 this year. After that, Axie.Tech launched a Pixels party on Twitter, which can be understood as a team building for Axie Infinity community players in the Pixels game. This is The first non-Axie series game appeared in a tweet from Axie.Tech.
These publicities all took place a week after Pixels officially migrated to Ronin. On November 26, the Axie community also held the Pixels x Axie Art Challenge, where players would have a chance to win prizes by creating works of art that combine elements of the two.
Using Axies community resources to boost Pixels is something that everyone from the player community to the game team is promoting. Jihoz, one of the founders of Ronin and responsible for the growth business, is also the founder of Axie Infinity. Jihoz mentioned Pixels on Twitter many times, shared its growth data, and even bluntly said that Pixels have the feeling of Axie Infinity. Pixels also responded to Jihozs enthusiasm in the game. Some players discovered that an NPC named Jihoz appeared in the Pixels map. This little easter egg was praised by players, Its a simple idea, but its cool.
Ronin regards the collaboration with Pixels as a job to show to the community. Ronin calls this achievement the Ronin Effect. The 4-year experience of building and operating Axie is still created by Ronin The confidence that the Web3 game ecosystem relies on. We know how to connect games with their first super fans. We did it once with Axie and weve done it again with Pixels.xyz.
After a month of rapid development, the founder of Pixels put forward a new outlook, Axie has proven that Web3 games can reach 1 million DAU - the real question is how Web3 games can break through 10 million DAU. This is another scale that requires Penetrating untapped audiences. Whether Ronin can achieve such a breakthrough is still unknown, but what is certain is that more games are being attracted to the Ronin ecosystem.
On November 8, the PC trading card game (TCG) Zoids Wild Arena, which was originally launched on Polygon, was moved to the Ronin ecosystem. The studio behind it, the Korean game production company ACT Games, also plans to move all its games next year Migrate to Ronin. Axie Infinitys official Twitter account also retweeted the migration information.
On December 5, Sky Mavis announced that it would cooperate with Singaporean game developer Foonie Magus. The card duel chain game Apeiron will be migrated to the Ronin network, and Mavis Market will also launch its NFT series. Frank Cheng, CEO of Foonie Magus, said that they chose Ronin because of its “game-centric vision and unwavering support for selected projects.” “Sky Mavis has demonstrated a deep understanding of the needs of on-chain game developers. .”
One week after the announcement of Apeirons move to Ronin, its UAW has seen significant improvement.
In addition, The Sandbox, a popular sandbox chain game with a higher market value than Axie Infinity, has also been rumored recently to be migrating to Ronin. The community discovered that a wallet with the Ronin domain name address from Seb.ron deployed SAND tokens on the Ronin testnet and made multiple transfers. The Sandbox did not directly respond to this rumor. Its CEO Sebastian Borget posted a tweet on the 12th about the statue model that has been popular in the Axie Infinity community recently, with the text Say hello to the Axie Infinity limited edition mysterious statue. It is the latest addition to The SandBox Paris office’s collection.”
New cycle, new imagination
On December 6, DeFi protocol Impossible Finance announced that it will deploy Launchpad based on the Ronin network, which will enable game studios on Ronin to launch their own ERC-20 tokens, and the liquidity of RON and AXS is likely to be directly linked to future Ronin The game tokens on the game are deeply bound. In addition, Ronin has recently integrated Binance Pay, which is also to increase the liquidity depth of AXS and SLP.
For Ronin, the resources accumulated by Axie alone are not enough to support an attractive Web3 game ecosystem. From building infrastructure to planning community activities to deploying Launchpad, Ronin is trying to build a comprehensive Web3 game chain. But there are more experienced and large-scale opponents in this field. For example, Immutable . In addition, Treasure DAO and game-specific chain Oasys built on Arbittrum are also constantly improving their developer ecology, and there is no shortage of votes from senior game studios.
It is undeniable that a large part of the reason why Ronin’s recent results have been outstanding is because of the overall recovery of the chain gaming circuit. It is still unclear how strong Ronin’s own driving force is. At present, in the eyes of the community, Ronins advantage seems to be just a story. Ronin created the leading blockchain game that once defined the concept of GameFi, returned all user funds after 600 million US dollars was stolen, and is still alive. A survivor of the second bull market.
For investors, what is more concerning is the appreciation space that Ronin brings to its underlying assets. On the one hand, Ronins TVL is currently four times that of Immutable X, and its on-chain transaction volume is much higher than the latter, but its market value is currently 1/5 of Immutable Xs. In the short term, Ronin’s momentum will continue. But how far can Ronins story support it in the fierce competition? The market is also waiting to see. Will the next Axie Infinity and Pixels come to Ronin?
